Prologue

Tears of the Soul

April, 2005

I am in the long, narrow galley kitchen of our house, listening to a track of soulful music and preparing dinner for the kids before they get home. A profound feeling of peacefulness washes over me, as if wholesomeness and well-being are coursing through my body. I feel deeply present, profoundly calm.

Suddenly, I have a flashback of a time not long ago; a time when I was so depressed, so hopeless, so engulfed in despair and pain.

I almost drop what I am cooking. I sit down on a kitchen chair and start to sob uncontrollably for what seems like a very long time. “I am sorry, Terry, I am so sorry,” I keep repeating to myself, over and over. “I wish I could have helped you but I just didn’t know how. I am so sorry.”

Weeping on that kitchen chair with all the smells and sounds of the family’s dinner bubbling around me, I realise that, throughout my years of depression and difficulties, I hadn’t known how to do better. I am thunderstruck by the depth of this insight. I had done my best. Had I known how to help myself more, of course I would have. But I didn’t. And so ensued many dark periods of anguish and sadness.

My self-apology is not because I feel guilty or because I have let myself down. I am simply experiencing the deepest empathy with myself. I am crying with and for the Terry who underwent so much suffering.

And yet there is nothing depressing about these tears. The version of Terry I am crying for is no longer here; she is no longer me. I am letting go and saying goodbye. My weeping is coming from such a deep reservoir of healing. They are tears of catharsis, tears of compassion, tears of connection. They are tears of the soul, of my soul.

I would never have imagined I needed to heal in this way - it was so spontaneous and unexpected - but it was exactly what I required. If this healing episode had not occurred, perhaps I would have looked back with regret and said: “I wish I hadn’t gone through that”, or “it’s too hard to talk about”. It is because of my spontaneous crying session that I no longer reflect on my life with guilt, pain, trauma, shame, regret or other negative emotions.

Rather, when I consider the tough times, I see them merely as what I needed to go through then. What has happened to me is the journey I needed to take. There’s a resolution, an understanding that my challenges were right and fitting. Sitting alone in that kitchen, there was a wondrous moment of catching a glimpse of clarity in the stark light, when I saw everything with perspective and compassion. I saw my part in it all. Everything made sense.

This is the power of the mind to heal. It offered me an unbidden experience so that I could move on. It does this without us needing to try, or even knowing how to do it. Because we don’t know how. But that’s just what the mind does. I had unknowingly touched a place of higher consciousness. From that time onward, anything seemed possible.

I had entered a space that I now know is the origin of infinite possibilities, of pure potential. It exists before we construct our ‘barrier thinking’, thinking that tells us who we are and what we can and cannot do. We unwittingly use this thinking to box ourselves in and close ourselves off. But this universal place of higher consciousness blows the lid off our boxes. It allows us to be so much more than our made-up personalities and limiting beliefs.

That day in the kitchen was testament to how the mind can elevate us if we let it do what needs to be done. It was an immense, perfect, exquisite moment.

***

A short time ago, in my role as Director of the Innate Health Centre in North West London, I underwent training for our organisation’s new website. I was thus introduced to the “back-end” of a website for the first time, a learning experience that was staggering for two reasons:

Firstly, I never knew there was such a thing as a front and back-end of a website, nor had I ever considered this was how a website was constructed. The front-/back-end explanation was novel to me, instantly opening up a whole new world of understanding about the operation of this dimension of cyberspace.

Secondly, it was mind-blowing to see what happened each time I accessed the back-end and made changes to the pages appearing on the front-end. I could add new images, blogs, programme listings and really have a lot of fun. And then, when I clicked on the “Update” button, the front-end of the website (which is what people actually see) was magically changed! I realised that the front-end of the website is always a reflection of the back-end. Even though the back- end is invisible to the user, it is where everything is actually created and from where all change emanates.

It is the perfect metaphor for what I intend to share in this book.

Most of us, during the course of our lives, try so hard to create change: in our relationships, jobs, finances, circumstances, feelings and our inner selves. And for so many of us, it often feels like a great struggle. Sometimes, it seems as though the harder we try, the more we perpetuate the problem and the feelings we are trying to get away from.

But we are not told that there is a front-end and a back-end to ALL experience of life. What we immerse ourselves in and often grapple with - the full spectrum of our emotional, mental and spiritual lives - comes from a back-end that we have not been educated about. Without knowing there is a back-end, and without knowing how it works, we are bound to be continually frustrated by the lack of results on the front-end.

This awareness is the key to all change and unlocks real psychological freedom.

Over time, I have come to see that my story - and the story of so many others - is about finding out that a back-end exists. And then understanding how that back-end works.

It is now ten years since I first came across this fundamental explanation of the human experience, known as the Three Principles. And over the course of the past decade, not only has it transformed my own life, but the lives of thousands of students and clients I have been privileged to teach. Countless others are being affected by this new paradigm as it sweeps the world.

This is my true story. But it is much more than being just about me. It is about an explanation of a perfectly Exquisite Mind that is available to us all.